ONCE IN A LIFETIME

In Mattaboni’s 1980s-set debut novel, an aspiring artist and her friends immerse themselves in the lifestyle of a funky resort town.

It’s 1984, and 20-year-old Jessica Addentro dreams of studying art in London. However, for this summer, she’ll have to settle for waitressing in New Hope, Pennsylvania, an artsy village on the Delaware River. She’s hoping to save up enough to spend her junior year in London, making multimedia art inspired by the city’s punk scene: “I want to recreate that shoulder-padded, safety-pinned, gelled-together world, through abstract shapes, swipes of color, and vivid bits of broken glass, and make it twice as beautiful on canvas. That’s not too much to ask, is it?” As she saves her pennies, she lives with three of her closest college friends from the University of Pittsburgh—plus a pet duck—in an area that proves to be full of countercultural types, including Matt “Whit” Whitlan, a bass player for a New Wave band whom she meets at a show in Philadelphia. Jess isn’t looking for a boyfriend—she and her college beau, Drew, are only “semi-dating” until she gets back to campus—but she’s about to have the kind of summer where nothing is off the table. Mattaboni’s prose is rich with sharp dialogue, musical references, and painterly details: “I’m a half-formed mosaic, dancing around in a world full of indecision and New Wave anarchy and the mystery terror of AIDS,” says Jess at one point. That said, the author has a habit of beating the reader over the head with the ’80s-ness of the setting, and the narrator seems a bit too self-aware at times for someone who’s barely out of her teens. Still, the author has a talent for enlivening even minor characters with memorable personalities, and she manages to capture the very real magic of small bohemian towns. Overall, it’s as much a nostalgia trip as it is a bildungsroman, but the reader won’t have to have personally lived through the ’80s to appreciate this ebullient and engaging story of youthful longing and independence.

An enjoyable, starry-eyed coming-of-age tale.